Vanessa Stoykov

From a small Australian farm to the heights of Australian business and rugby greatness, Simon Poidevin has more than made his mark on life.

Hello, I’m Vanessa Stoykov, the CEO of the evolution media group, and on today’s episode of evoTV’s The Bottom Line, CPA Australia’s CEO, Alex Malley, talks with Simon about what drives him in life and what it takes to scale the heights of elite sport.

Alex Malley

Hi Simon, welcome to The Bottom Line

Simon Poidevin

It’s great to be here.

Alex Malley

Do you mentor? Is that something that comes naturally?

Simon Poidevin

Mentoring is very important and I do a bit of mentoring with Rocky Elson now for example, so we think very much alike there. So mentoring is a very important thing and mentoring was a very important thing when I was at Citi especially through the GFC because Citigroup I don't think it was ever going to go under but there were some days there you thought, you walk into tomorrow and this has happened because no-one knew what was going to happen when the great Wall Street banks were starting to crash at their foundations and so there was a lot of younger people in that environment at Citi used to come to me all the time through that period and they were really scared of what was going on. So it was nice to provide that mentoring then.

Alex Malley

Absolutely. I mean do you remember those times looking at it thinking this could be a massive collapse, this could be a real failure of the organisation or ...